Citizenfour (2014)
I've completed a LOT of work in the last week, both in terms of my writing career and my academic career (and my actual full time job lol) and managed not to fall apart (too badly) while doing it, and so I'm rewarding myself with an indulgent movie review.
Last night, at 11pm my brain decided it would be a good idea for me to watch Citizenfour, the Oscar winning documentary about Edward Snowden.
You can watch the film in full on youtube, thanks to the Israeli Broadcast Authority, as I did (you will have to deal with Hebrew subtitles though).
This is not going to be a comprehensive review (I really do mean it about the indulgent part). The brief version is: I loved it as a documentary (definitely going to track down Laura Poitras' other movies now). The school of documentary making in the US doesn't usually appeal to me - there's too much emphasis on drama and sentimentality, for me - but this movie was simply perfection. It was executed so exquisitely, had such great structure, and didn't sink into being a story about one man's personality (but rather tried to tell a much broader story, with the human elements serving to illustrate it).
I loved the context this movie gave for Snowden's revelations, both in terms of the background, through Willian Binney, and the future implications, through the Occupy Wall Street activists. I loved, for some inexplicable reason, Poitras' voice reading out Snowden's letters to her early on. I think coming from her the words really did sound like something being drawn into a weird espionage novel.
(Very shallowly, I have a thing for confident, introverted, polite geek boys and MY GOD did Snowden fit the bill. I know I'm not the only one to have those feelings, but it was pretty weird how drawn to him I was, especially considering he was going through basically the most stressful period of his life in the movie.)
It was weird, the things about Snowden I did and didn't anticipate. I knew the way he'd be talking about the Intelligence would be boring to me, not because I've already heard his revelations but because I already know 90% of what he had to say, in principle if not in the details. He and I are from different corners of the intelligence community, but nothing Snowden revealed as in any way new or unknown to me. In fact it's very evident in the movie that he makes sure to only reveal 101 type stuff to the journalists, protecting what he feels are "legitimate" secrets that actually have to do with active operations.
It was utterly surreal to hear someone like him talk to civilians about the mundane details of his job. Surreal because I've always thought of that as something that was entirely impossible, especially impossible in the context of trying to enact positive political/social changes. When I was 18 every day for 4 months we started our mornings with "15 minutes of safety" that is - information safety (formerly "field safety"). This was basically a way to start our day (at a secure military base where we slept) by reminding ourselves and each other about the importance of keeping our mouths shut.
(For a while I thought the reason Snowden came forward was partially that he was a contractor, and as a tech guy and an outsider he never went through the same intense indoctrination about secrecy that agents usually do. But that turned out to be incorrect - he did have appropriate training at earlier stages of his career, whatever form that takes in the US.)
Anyway, nine years after I've left intelligence, be assured I still have all those habits running through my head - will have them forever. I use code words offhandedly when talking to my friends unless we're face to face, I do extremely agile mental calculations whenever I mention anything online, in email or publicly in a blog like this. I mean, the one thing you'll never be able to say about me is that I share any information about my time in the military unthinkingly or unconsciously. I spent two years doing these calculations a hundred times a day, and that habit is never going away.
So, it was hilarious and weird to see these mental mannerisms reflected in someone else, so foreign to me, and reflected in public where civilians could react to them. Snowden's paranoia is very different in nature from the paranoia of the journalists. He has no idea when he'll be caught - he assumes a fire alarm outside might be the NSA coming for him - but he's very calm about it. He knows where the threats are, he knows he's done everything he could, and he has a habit - like I did, like all intelligence employees with even a basic amount of clearance do - to stop worrying about it after that. I remember an NSA official saying, many many years ago in one of their videos, as the agency was struggling to move from the analogue to the digital age - that there is no such thing as risk avoidance when it comes to intelligence. There's only risk management.
So, it was cool to see that in real time, compared with the journalists in the room, who behaved much the same way intelligence recruits behave in their first few months of training. They learned all these 101 truths about how the world really works, and suddenly their reality shifted, and the paranoia became nearly unbearable. I remember feeling that way at 18, and I remember the good old, time honored traditions of pranking the fuck out of recruits when they're in that vulnerable state.
(In general, Snowden's NSA experience was a lot less... playful than mine? I mean they definitely had their own inappropriate humor, but it seemed to be something that was done during coffee breaks and after hours, whereas where I'm from officers with serious rank on their shoulder will be roped into even a mediocre prank at the drop of a hat. Let's start with how my commander's commander once pulled us into his office and pretended he'd found booze in our room because my team wanted to prank us in honor of passing another stage of our training. People used to dress mops up in bright orange suits and drop them from high buildings to freak out new recruits, they used to stick scary notices about "mandatory urine tests" and "radiation inspections" up when newbies were around, they used to make FAKE FLOOR PLANS to make rookies think there were secret rooms they weren't allowed in. Like, every corner of our working spaces was covered in stuffed animals and humorous posters and stickers. I think it was part of the coping mechanisms for the sort of work we did, that required a LOT of mental strain most people were unprepared for - being 18 year olds - but, it was interesting to realize that Snowden's environment definitely didn't look like that.)
Anyway, Snowden's calm - which the journalists kept commenting on, his obvious lack of paranoia, were very weirdly familiar. So were his attempts at explaining basic Intelligence stuff to the journalists, the ways he phrased things, the things he censored. I don't know, I just identified with all of it so much, oh my god. The moment where they ask him about security clearance and he has to clarify that security clearance doesn't work the way people assume - 'top secret' really doesn't mean much. I could sort of see him inwardly sigh like, "oh right, they don't even know this, ugh another thing I have to explain", like the gulf is so WIDE because of the secrecy. I could also see where, at least in the clips shown in the movie, he often chose to explain the parts that were pertinent instead of going 'well actually your entire phrasing of that question is wrong', I assume at least partially because he was there to share specific information and had limited time.
I think one of the most jarring moments was when someone tells Laura? or Glenn? that the only secure way to pass information/get info from a source today would be meeting face to face. That's the easiest way to pass information securely, because face-to-face stuff is the hardest thing to track - much harder than any electronic communication. The journalist in the movie was shocked by this - I think because they felt it was very old school, very spy novel - but I literally don't remember anymore the time when I didn't know this fact to be true. It's always been such a basic tenet - and that was before Facebook and smartphones and big data becoming what it is today.
The movie also made me think of what I consider the most apt quote about my own feelings on privacy and surveillance and Intelligence.
I felt incredibly alienated from the discussion Snowden's revelations originally initiated, about the state's right to spy on everyone and so forth. Not because I don't agree with Snowden's point about the need for restrictions, but because of something I couldn't put my finger on, and this movie helped me figure out what it was.
Snowden largely talks about a scenario where fictional revolutionaries would be working against the government, and at some point in the future the democratic process could suffer because the government would have tools that were too powerful to suppress opposition.
And that's a perfectly valid argument, but I just... I don't care about it in anything but the vaguest intellectual way. And the reason for this, I think, is that for Snowden the worst case scenario is a kind of future dystopia, where for me... the worst case scenario has already happened. There's no point in talking about a hypothetical uprising in my country - the uprising has happened, several times. The government has done and continues to do its worst. 9/11 was a shock for the US, and for many other countries in the world - it was not in any way a shock for Israel because suicide bombers were accomplishing up to 5 incidents a day for months at a time when I was growing up. I mean there's no question of what a hypothetical government would do in a hypothetical worst case scenario - we are living that scenario. A (Jewish) extremist shot our prime minister when I was 9. We're at war every few summers. There is no worse than this. I don't have to wonder what my government would do - whatever it's capable of, it's already doing.
In the movie Snowden's revelations were contextualized differently in each country - in Brazil they talked about one set of ramifications, in Germany another, in the UK yet another. I've never seen Snowden's revelations contextualized for Israel, and so while I found the public phenomenon of his revelations fascinating, I didn't feel a particular connection to any of the arguments raised in English, at least.
The other reason talk about the dangers of losing privacy to state agents never particularly moved me (again, not because I don't agree we should have privacy, but because I have a weird inability to care, which I once thought stemmed from having too much faith in the system, but have since realized isn't that at all) was because of something I read in an article a while ago, and felt so overwhelmed by I never managed to put it in a post.
It was an article by a journalist who covered cyber security and had spent a long time exploring that world as an outsider. She had noticed that the overwhelming majority of Intelligence people she'd talked to - people who knew the scope of privacy invasions better than anyone - were completely indifferent towards the topic, and couldn't understand the outrage of outsiders. She concluded that this was because for intelligence workers a complete and total loss of privacy was the basic entrance requirement for the job. And having lived their lives in this state for years, they couldn't understand why anyone would mind it that much in anything but a distant, intellectual way.
This was an utter revelation to me, and is I think absolutely the reason for the disconnect I feel. I haven't thought the internet - or any form of non face-to-face communication - was private since 2004. I no longer remember what I used to think of my internet privacy, before Intelligence. I've lived the majority of my internet life knowing for certain that absolutely everything I did was being read by someone, somewhere, or at the very least probably stored somewhere for a period of time. This didn't make me stop living as I would, it just meant I lived with awareness. I still shared what I wanted to share, recorded what I wanted to record, etc. So it's just... kind of impossible for me to get into the head of someone who's spent a decade thinking locking something or encrypting something meant a significant chance at protection or privacy. I can't imagine what that betrayal must feel like, how scary or angering it might be. Because so many of my friends are also Intelligence grads, I've never really encountered this mindset IRL either.
I think it would take significant research for me to get into the mindset of being upset by nothing on the internet being private (and by this I mean, nothing being private for government agencies, not commercial entities, which is a different story). And realizing that, being able to put my finger on what's been making me feel like an outsider and a weirdo in all these discussions, was really significant.
Anyway, Snowden is of course a very interesting figure in that sense, although I don't think treatment of foreign citizens - although it bothers him in the movie - would have ever gotten him to come forward. He was specifically upset by violations of law that had to do with domestic spying.
Finally, I unexpectedly LOVED the very last scene, where Snowden meets with the journalists a while later, out of the NSA, settled in Russia post all the drama of his escape.
In contradiction to the calm, collected Snowden in the hotel in Hong Kong, here he's on edge, he's upset, he's visibly moved by the new revelations coming forward from the source Glenn tells him about.
There was something about him that felt so painfully, devastatingly familiar to me. Snowden left on his own terms, but he'd still spent his entire adult life in the intelligence community, and now he was cut off from it, and it was sort of the difference between being on the front lines and worrying at home that I could so, so strongly identify with. Suddenly Snowden had no control, no in, and he was agitated and upset and nervous. I think the part about him I identified with most was how much he clearly cared about this work, and continues to care about it (although I'm sure his opinions have evolved as he's interacted with media and the public), and how different it was for him, suddenly to be cut off. How much it clearly fucked him up, beyond simply being surprised by new information, to get news from inside the organization he no longer had access to. Under different circumstances and with different sort of information, I still recognized his expression and body language from every meeting I've ever had with former colleagues when one of them returns from reserve duty or brings a currently active worker to one of our get togethers.
comments on Dreamwidth
Last night, at 11pm my brain decided it would be a good idea for me to watch Citizenfour, the Oscar winning documentary about Edward Snowden.
You can watch the film in full on youtube, thanks to the Israeli Broadcast Authority, as I did (you will have to deal with Hebrew subtitles though).
This is not going to be a comprehensive review (I really do mean it about the indulgent part). The brief version is: I loved it as a documentary (definitely going to track down Laura Poitras' other movies now). The school of documentary making in the US doesn't usually appeal to me - there's too much emphasis on drama and sentimentality, for me - but this movie was simply perfection. It was executed so exquisitely, had such great structure, and didn't sink into being a story about one man's personality (but rather tried to tell a much broader story, with the human elements serving to illustrate it).
I loved the context this movie gave for Snowden's revelations, both in terms of the background, through Willian Binney, and the future implications, through the Occupy Wall Street activists. I loved, for some inexplicable reason, Poitras' voice reading out Snowden's letters to her early on. I think coming from her the words really did sound like something being drawn into a weird espionage novel.
(Very shallowly, I have a thing for confident, introverted, polite geek boys and MY GOD did Snowden fit the bill. I know I'm not the only one to have those feelings, but it was pretty weird how drawn to him I was, especially considering he was going through basically the most stressful period of his life in the movie.)
It was weird, the things about Snowden I did and didn't anticipate. I knew the way he'd be talking about the Intelligence would be boring to me, not because I've already heard his revelations but because I already know 90% of what he had to say, in principle if not in the details. He and I are from different corners of the intelligence community, but nothing Snowden revealed as in any way new or unknown to me. In fact it's very evident in the movie that he makes sure to only reveal 101 type stuff to the journalists, protecting what he feels are "legitimate" secrets that actually have to do with active operations.
It was utterly surreal to hear someone like him talk to civilians about the mundane details of his job. Surreal because I've always thought of that as something that was entirely impossible, especially impossible in the context of trying to enact positive political/social changes. When I was 18 every day for 4 months we started our mornings with "15 minutes of safety" that is - information safety (formerly "field safety"). This was basically a way to start our day (at a secure military base where we slept) by reminding ourselves and each other about the importance of keeping our mouths shut.
(For a while I thought the reason Snowden came forward was partially that he was a contractor, and as a tech guy and an outsider he never went through the same intense indoctrination about secrecy that agents usually do. But that turned out to be incorrect - he did have appropriate training at earlier stages of his career, whatever form that takes in the US.)
Anyway, nine years after I've left intelligence, be assured I still have all those habits running through my head - will have them forever. I use code words offhandedly when talking to my friends unless we're face to face, I do extremely agile mental calculations whenever I mention anything online, in email or publicly in a blog like this. I mean, the one thing you'll never be able to say about me is that I share any information about my time in the military unthinkingly or unconsciously. I spent two years doing these calculations a hundred times a day, and that habit is never going away.
So, it was hilarious and weird to see these mental mannerisms reflected in someone else, so foreign to me, and reflected in public where civilians could react to them. Snowden's paranoia is very different in nature from the paranoia of the journalists. He has no idea when he'll be caught - he assumes a fire alarm outside might be the NSA coming for him - but he's very calm about it. He knows where the threats are, he knows he's done everything he could, and he has a habit - like I did, like all intelligence employees with even a basic amount of clearance do - to stop worrying about it after that. I remember an NSA official saying, many many years ago in one of their videos, as the agency was struggling to move from the analogue to the digital age - that there is no such thing as risk avoidance when it comes to intelligence. There's only risk management.
So, it was cool to see that in real time, compared with the journalists in the room, who behaved much the same way intelligence recruits behave in their first few months of training. They learned all these 101 truths about how the world really works, and suddenly their reality shifted, and the paranoia became nearly unbearable. I remember feeling that way at 18, and I remember the good old, time honored traditions of pranking the fuck out of recruits when they're in that vulnerable state.
(In general, Snowden's NSA experience was a lot less... playful than mine? I mean they definitely had their own inappropriate humor, but it seemed to be something that was done during coffee breaks and after hours, whereas where I'm from officers with serious rank on their shoulder will be roped into even a mediocre prank at the drop of a hat. Let's start with how my commander's commander once pulled us into his office and pretended he'd found booze in our room because my team wanted to prank us in honor of passing another stage of our training. People used to dress mops up in bright orange suits and drop them from high buildings to freak out new recruits, they used to stick scary notices about "mandatory urine tests" and "radiation inspections" up when newbies were around, they used to make FAKE FLOOR PLANS to make rookies think there were secret rooms they weren't allowed in. Like, every corner of our working spaces was covered in stuffed animals and humorous posters and stickers. I think it was part of the coping mechanisms for the sort of work we did, that required a LOT of mental strain most people were unprepared for - being 18 year olds - but, it was interesting to realize that Snowden's environment definitely didn't look like that.)
Anyway, Snowden's calm - which the journalists kept commenting on, his obvious lack of paranoia, were very weirdly familiar. So were his attempts at explaining basic Intelligence stuff to the journalists, the ways he phrased things, the things he censored. I don't know, I just identified with all of it so much, oh my god. The moment where they ask him about security clearance and he has to clarify that security clearance doesn't work the way people assume - 'top secret' really doesn't mean much. I could sort of see him inwardly sigh like, "oh right, they don't even know this, ugh another thing I have to explain", like the gulf is so WIDE because of the secrecy. I could also see where, at least in the clips shown in the movie, he often chose to explain the parts that were pertinent instead of going 'well actually your entire phrasing of that question is wrong', I assume at least partially because he was there to share specific information and had limited time.
I think one of the most jarring moments was when someone tells Laura? or Glenn? that the only secure way to pass information/get info from a source today would be meeting face to face. That's the easiest way to pass information securely, because face-to-face stuff is the hardest thing to track - much harder than any electronic communication. The journalist in the movie was shocked by this - I think because they felt it was very old school, very spy novel - but I literally don't remember anymore the time when I didn't know this fact to be true. It's always been such a basic tenet - and that was before Facebook and smartphones and big data becoming what it is today.
The movie also made me think of what I consider the most apt quote about my own feelings on privacy and surveillance and Intelligence.
I felt incredibly alienated from the discussion Snowden's revelations originally initiated, about the state's right to spy on everyone and so forth. Not because I don't agree with Snowden's point about the need for restrictions, but because of something I couldn't put my finger on, and this movie helped me figure out what it was.
Snowden largely talks about a scenario where fictional revolutionaries would be working against the government, and at some point in the future the democratic process could suffer because the government would have tools that were too powerful to suppress opposition.
And that's a perfectly valid argument, but I just... I don't care about it in anything but the vaguest intellectual way. And the reason for this, I think, is that for Snowden the worst case scenario is a kind of future dystopia, where for me... the worst case scenario has already happened. There's no point in talking about a hypothetical uprising in my country - the uprising has happened, several times. The government has done and continues to do its worst. 9/11 was a shock for the US, and for many other countries in the world - it was not in any way a shock for Israel because suicide bombers were accomplishing up to 5 incidents a day for months at a time when I was growing up. I mean there's no question of what a hypothetical government would do in a hypothetical worst case scenario - we are living that scenario. A (Jewish) extremist shot our prime minister when I was 9. We're at war every few summers. There is no worse than this. I don't have to wonder what my government would do - whatever it's capable of, it's already doing.
In the movie Snowden's revelations were contextualized differently in each country - in Brazil they talked about one set of ramifications, in Germany another, in the UK yet another. I've never seen Snowden's revelations contextualized for Israel, and so while I found the public phenomenon of his revelations fascinating, I didn't feel a particular connection to any of the arguments raised in English, at least.
The other reason talk about the dangers of losing privacy to state agents never particularly moved me (again, not because I don't agree we should have privacy, but because I have a weird inability to care, which I once thought stemmed from having too much faith in the system, but have since realized isn't that at all) was because of something I read in an article a while ago, and felt so overwhelmed by I never managed to put it in a post.
It was an article by a journalist who covered cyber security and had spent a long time exploring that world as an outsider. She had noticed that the overwhelming majority of Intelligence people she'd talked to - people who knew the scope of privacy invasions better than anyone - were completely indifferent towards the topic, and couldn't understand the outrage of outsiders. She concluded that this was because for intelligence workers a complete and total loss of privacy was the basic entrance requirement for the job. And having lived their lives in this state for years, they couldn't understand why anyone would mind it that much in anything but a distant, intellectual way.
This was an utter revelation to me, and is I think absolutely the reason for the disconnect I feel. I haven't thought the internet - or any form of non face-to-face communication - was private since 2004. I no longer remember what I used to think of my internet privacy, before Intelligence. I've lived the majority of my internet life knowing for certain that absolutely everything I did was being read by someone, somewhere, or at the very least probably stored somewhere for a period of time. This didn't make me stop living as I would, it just meant I lived with awareness. I still shared what I wanted to share, recorded what I wanted to record, etc. So it's just... kind of impossible for me to get into the head of someone who's spent a decade thinking locking something or encrypting something meant a significant chance at protection or privacy. I can't imagine what that betrayal must feel like, how scary or angering it might be. Because so many of my friends are also Intelligence grads, I've never really encountered this mindset IRL either.
I think it would take significant research for me to get into the mindset of being upset by nothing on the internet being private (and by this I mean, nothing being private for government agencies, not commercial entities, which is a different story). And realizing that, being able to put my finger on what's been making me feel like an outsider and a weirdo in all these discussions, was really significant.
Anyway, Snowden is of course a very interesting figure in that sense, although I don't think treatment of foreign citizens - although it bothers him in the movie - would have ever gotten him to come forward. He was specifically upset by violations of law that had to do with domestic spying.
Finally, I unexpectedly LOVED the very last scene, where Snowden meets with the journalists a while later, out of the NSA, settled in Russia post all the drama of his escape.
In contradiction to the calm, collected Snowden in the hotel in Hong Kong, here he's on edge, he's upset, he's visibly moved by the new revelations coming forward from the source Glenn tells him about.
There was something about him that felt so painfully, devastatingly familiar to me. Snowden left on his own terms, but he'd still spent his entire adult life in the intelligence community, and now he was cut off from it, and it was sort of the difference between being on the front lines and worrying at home that I could so, so strongly identify with. Suddenly Snowden had no control, no in, and he was agitated and upset and nervous. I think the part about him I identified with most was how much he clearly cared about this work, and continues to care about it (although I'm sure his opinions have evolved as he's interacted with media and the public), and how different it was for him, suddenly to be cut off. How much it clearly fucked him up, beyond simply being surprised by new information, to get news from inside the organization he no longer had access to. Under different circumstances and with different sort of information, I still recognized his expression and body language from every meeting I've ever had with former colleagues when one of them returns from reserve duty or brings a currently active worker to one of our get togethers.
comments on Dreamwidth